Shire’s parents had also gone to England as refugees from Somalia, and through the years she had often talked with her uncle about his past. He immigrated to England, but he never married or had children. But when a civil war broke out in Somalia, in the early nineties, he lost the scholarship. When her uncle was a teen-ager, he won a scholarship to study abroad family members spoke of him as the relative who had great promise. And you do that every single day and never get anywhere, because you’re constantly lying to yourself.” And then the sun comes up, and the towers have been toppled. “I asked him how it feels to do that.” He told her, “While you’re high, it’s like you build, with your words and with your dreams, these massive towers of what you’re going to do tomorrow, how you’re going to fix up your life. “When you chew khat, you don’t sleep, it keeps you up,” Shire told me recently. ![]() Her uncle had lost most of his teeth because of his khat addiction. Shire, who is thirty-three, with dark curls and a high forehead, sat with him in his room at a boarding house in Northwest London, where several immigrant men lived. GradeSaver, 21 November 2023 Web.On a wet day in London, around 2013, the poet Warsan Shire turned on a voice recorder as her uncle talked about his youth in Somalia, his life as a refugee, and his addiction to the bitter-leaf stimulant khat. Next Section Quotes and Analysis Previous Section Glossary Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format GradeSaver "Home (Warsan Shire poem) Themes". Although many migrants want to assimilate quickly to their new countries, many also feel a deep connection to their home countries-a sense of belonging that is vital to their identity construction upon their arrival, which is why many migrants form ethnic enclaves to preserve a sense of their lost homes. Even when she is being threatened, she "carrie the anthem under breath." This expresses a true sense of pride in her home and culture and a desire to preserve it even as it is being ripped apart by violence and hate. ![]() But this does not change the fact that she misses it. The narrator clearly misses home and longs to return home, but her home country has been so torn apart by violence-and continues to be-that she knows she can never go back. For no one would voluntarily leave their homes, and face bigotry, hatred, and danger in a new, foreign country, if home were not so much worse. The dream of what home once was only exists in her imagination now, and she wants to make it clear to the reader that she-like all migrants-would go home if she could. The speaker is clearly sick with longing for the way life used to be she sobs when she tears apart her passport, and she misses the boy she kissed once in a tin factory. ![]() Shire's "Home" is, in a sense, a twisted love letter to a home that does not exist anymore. It is begging those who hate migrants to consider the violence that they were forced to flee from. It is incoherent, not coming from only one person but rather expressing the general sentiments and the hatred that many migrants face.īigotry, or prejudice, is essentially what the poem is addressing. The poem's sixth stanza is a collage of commonly repeated phrases used to express bigotry, xenophobia, and fear of foreigners and immigrants. This presence of violence in every aspect of the poem reveals the pervasive harm that war and displacement and hatred cause, leaching into every facet of people's life and completely altering the way they perceive the world. Everything, even things that are not traditionally violent, are made so in the realm of the poem: breath is "bloody" and passports are never merely thrown away they are torn apart and sobbed over. "Home" describes violence unflinchingly and viscerally, beginning with the phrase "mouth of a shark" being used to describe the war-torn environments that often cause migrants to leave their homes. It is what drives the poem's subjects from their homes, it is what defines their journeys, and it is also what greets them when they arrive at the places that promised them refuge. Violence pervades "Home," from beginning to end. It is comprised of various scenes of discomfort and displacement, violence and movement leading to a loss of physical as well as spiritual home. ![]() "Home" is a poem about migration, about what happens to people when, uprooted from their homes, they find themselves unable to find acceptance in the places they fled to looking for safety. Displacement, migration, and diaspora are all words that define Warsan Shire's poem "Home," as well as much of her work.
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